Trained listener (PoemTalk #35)

Bruce Andrews, "Center"

The range of Bruce Andrews’s work is fairly well represented by the recordings available on his PennSound page. The earliest recorded reading we have dates from late 1977, the most recent (as of this writing) is from 2008. Generally it is true that PoemTalk’s format – the choice of a single short poem for which a recording exists – will tend to misrepresent the whole of the poet’s work. Fortunately it’s not the aim of PoemTalk to represent the whole, but to have a good and earnest listen and look at the single instance along the way, Having done this 35 times in this series, we find, mostly to our surprise, that tenable general statements of a poet’s mode and aesthetic disposition do come through the back door of low conceptual expectations. Surely that’s what happened here, when Tan Lin, Chris Funkhouser, Sarah Dowling and Al Filreis took on a single poem from Andrews’ sequence called Moebius. Moebius was written in the late 1970s but not published until 1993, when a chapbook appeared from the Generator Press in Ohio. On November 10, 1977 Andrews came to the Ear Inn in New York, performed at a reading alongside Ray DiPalma and Michael Lally, and gave us fine readings of many of the Moebius poems, including “Center,” which is the piece we discuss in PT35.

First we found something we took to be unusual in Andrews: the emphasis on distancing goes along with a tone of softness and wistfulness (as Sarah suggests), perhaps even vulnerability notwithstanding the aggressive idiom (“I make the rules here”). But soon we sensed we were seeing the Bruce Andrews we would know from later works. Naturally one asks if the speaker of these masculine phrases--all this deliberate 70s guy talk--is an individual, a single subject. No, Tan Lin suggests, the poem’s phrases comprise not those of an individual speaker but identify the language production we associate with a particular kind of speaker. So the poem is a meta-statement on how language is generated and that, in turn, constructs a kind of identity, although that identity is never really offered. As Chris points out, the poem feels like an aggressive encroachment on the white space of the page. The poem, spiraling down the page, forces one to think of a moebius shape which claims centrality (has a center but yet doesn’t quite). Such a claim, because of the moebius, will seem repeatedly arbitrary, and so does the normative standard for the discernment, by socio-linguistic cues, of a fixable speaking identity, and so that (the emptiness of that effort) is your center. (Which is to say: what center? why are you looking here for one?)

“Center” might be an internalized monologue; such self-formed speaking permits the non-sequitur. At the same time, though, the poem’s eschewing of beginning, middle and end reminds Chris of the permutation work that the digital poets have been doing in recent years. “It reminds me of certain works I’ve seen on my screen rather than on a page.” Chris wants to think of this poem as pre-digital. It certainly helped us to conceive of it this way for the purposes of discussion.

Here is the Ear Inn recording of our poem, from 1977. And here [PDF] are a few pages from the Generator Press edition of Moebius.

POEMTALK is a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation. PoemTalk's producer and host is Al Filreis, our engineers are James La Marre and Chris Martin, and our editor for every episode has been Steve McLaughlin, who is also podcastseditor of Jacket2. PoemTalk is also available on iTunes. Click this link to subscribe; or go to your iTunes music store and type "PoemTalk" in the search box.

GATHERING PARADISE:At the end of each episode of PoemTalk, we gather paradise, commending one person or trend or happening in the poetry world. Here is a sampling of paradisal gathering across the episodes:[] Thinking about Williams's sense of the postindustrial way we live, Linh suggested we look at Mike Davis on "our living arrangements" (PT #1). [] Rachel celebrated the publication of the new bpNichol Reader, Alphabet Game (PT #3).[] Erica Kaufman commended David Trinidad's new book, The Late Show, in particular the poem "From the Life of Joe Brainard" (PT#5). [] Kenny Goldsmith happily pointed out a feature on UbuWeb in the March 2008 issue of Artforum (PT#6). [] Ron Silliman recommended a poetic sequence by Philip Whalen entitled The Children, based on photographs by Aram Saroyan (PT #8). [] C.A. Conrad recommends State of the Union: 50 Political Poems from Wave Books (PT #13). [] David Grazian, thinking of poetics-minded sociologists, wants us to read Loic Wacquant's Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (PT #18). [] Wystan Curnow wants us to look at jackbooks.com (PT #22). [] Joe Milutis suggests we all check out the work Danny Snelson has been doing (PT #25).[] Frank Sherlock urges us all to read Joe Massey (PT #23).[] Natalie Gerber commends the Dodge Poetry Festival and its new-ish YouTube channel (PT #24).[] We all praised Lorenzo Thomas's Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition, esp. Aldon Nielsen who had the happy/unhappy task of editing it posthumously (PT #26).[] Joe Milutis suggests we all check out the work Danny Snelson has been doing (PT #25).

From left to right, Jerome Rothenberg, Jeffrey Robinson, and Charles Bernstein discuss Robert Duncan for PoemTalk #27.